GamerGate: Part I: Sex, Lies, and Gender Games

A controversy over videogames has become a battle in a larger culture war.

jontintinjordan / FoterA controversy over videogames may seem an
unlikely candidate for a big story, especially with everything else
in the news. Yet an epic Internet drama known as "GamerGate," now
in its second month, continues to get media attention and fuel
animated debate. (In its latest flare-up, Intel
found itself in the crossfire last week when it pulled its ads
from Gamasutra, a gaming webzine at the center of the quarrel.)
While this saga has everything from sex to alleged corruption,
GamerGate has also become a battle in a larger culture war. To the
liberal and
progressive commentariat, it's part of a reactionary white male
backlash against the rise of diversity—in this case, "sexist thugs"
out to silence and destroy women who seek equality in the gaming
subculture. To
conservatives and right-leaning
libertarians, it's a welcome pushback against left-wing
cultural diktat, particularly in the area of gender politics.
Meanwhile, gamergaters themselves—who seem
to lean left-libertarian—say that what they want is ethics and
transparency in the gaming media.

As often happens, reality is more complex than any of these
narratives. While the gamers' revolt has very legitimate issues, is
also true that it has been linked to some very ugly misogynist
harassment of feminists. It also seems clear that the overwhelming
majority of GamerGate supporters reject such tactics—and that
harassment related to this conflict has been a two-way street. For
a supposed misogynist "hate mob," GamerGate includes a lot of vocal
women—and they have their own complaints of gender-based abuse,
such as being called gender traitors or even "male sockpuppets."
Finally, the feminism GamerGate rebels against is not simply about
equality or diversity; it is an authoritarian, far-left brand
of gender politics that views everything through the lens of
patriarchal oppression and tolerates no dissent.

A disclaimer is in order: I am not a gamer, unless you count
playing Space Invaders and Millipede at the student center arcade
in college and a mild Tetris addiction after I got my first home
computer. While I have no experience with role-playing videogames,
I have some knowledge of them thanks to several (mainly female)
friends who play and one who writes videogame-based fan
fiction.

I do have personal experience with the gamers' mortal enemies,
the so-called "social justice warriors," to know they can be a
highly toxic Internet presence. Those who voice their loathing of
"the SJWs" are not simply talking about people sympathetic to
socially progressive causes but about cultist zealots who enforce
the party line with the fervor of Mao's Red Guards, though luckily
without the real-life power. In social-media discussions of art and
entertainment, the "warriors" can be found sniffing out and
attacking such ideological deviations as liking a heterosexual love
interest for a character perceived as gay, liking or disliking
a character on the wrong side of race-and-gender identity politics,
or (I kid you not) using the "ableist"
nickname "derpy" for a klutzy pony on the TV cartoon My
Little Pony. Let them gain enough influence in an online
community, and they will poison it for anyone who wants to talk to
other fans of their favorite shows, movies, or books—or
games—without relentless hectoring about "privilege" and
"oppression."

Back to "GamerGate" and its tangled web. (A fairly detailed,
straightforward, and balanced chronicle of the events can be read
on the
Know Your Meme website.) The drama began in mid-August, when
Eron Gjoni, a programmer and ex-boyfriend of videogame developer
Zoe Quinn, made a massive blogpost accusing
her of infidelities and deceptions, with screenshots of their
online chats as corroboration. Quinn, a vocal "social justice"
Internet activist, had numerous enemies—many of them on the
notoriously anarchic, anonymous 4Chan message board. They were
quick to seize on the disclosures, portraying this as an ethics
issue because some of Quinn's liaisons had possible implications of
favoritism. One of her partners was later a judge in an independent
videogame festival that had just bestowed an award on Quinn's game,
Depression Quest; another was a videogame journalist who
had given her a couple of positive mentions. Threads discussing
this dust-up, some of them quite nasty, proliferated in a variety
of forums.

With the focus on Quinn's sexual conduct and allegations of
using sex for professional gain, the "Quinnspiracy"—as it was
initially known—was inevitably seen as a
sexist attempt to take down a female developer. In late August,
the controversy got a boost when actor Adam Baldwin, whose politics
lean right, took interest in it and tweeted
links to some YouTube videos critical of Quinn—also coining the
#GamerGate hashtag. Around the same time, feminist media critic
Anita Sarkeesian, whose
Tropes vs. Women video series critiquing sexist clichés in
videogames had made her the gaming community's bête noire,
reported that she had left her home as a precaution after a
Twitter user sent her a string of rape and death threats which
included her address.

For some, the attacks on Quinn and on Sarkeesian became a
perfect storm of gaming-culture misogyny. On August 28,
Gamasutra ran a
blistering attack on "game culture" by feminist cultural critic
Leigh Alexander, declaring that "gamers are over" and ridiculing
them as socially inept, badly dressed young males addicted to
mindless gadget-buying and "getting mad on the Internet." This was
followed by a spate of online articles—both on
sites devoted to
gaming or "geek
culture" and in general-interest publications such as
Vice and
The Daily Beast—attacking gamer culture or announcing its
demise. The gamers struck back in the social media, finding
supporters in gadfly tech blogger
Milo Yiannopoulous of Breitbart London and dissident
feminist/critic of feminism Christina Hoff Sommers.

Sorting out the charges and countercharges in this still-ongoing
war, with its claims of chat room conspiracies, manipulation of
electronic records, hacking, harassment and other malfeasance,
would be a gargantuan task. But here are a few facts.

1. The "Quinnspiracy" was not just—and not even
primarily—about attacking Zoe Quinn as a woman.

To be sure, discussions of the Quinn drama in free-access,
unmoderated chatrooms can be easily mined for crude, hateful,
disgusting comments. However, GamerGate blogger J.W. Caine makes
a strong case that those chats reveal far more interest in
attacking the "social justice warriors" and SJW-friendly tech media
than in targeting Quinn herself. Indeed, many discussants warned
that personal and sexual attacks on Quinn would undermine the
larger effort—a fact conceded even by writer/blogger
Jon Stone, a passionate GamerGate opponent.

It is also absurd to suggest that Quinn was disliked simply for
being an award-winning female videogame developer. (There have been
no hate campaigns against far more prominent women in the field
such as Ubisoft executive Jade Raymond, who helped create the hit
game Assassin's Creed, or Kim Swift, designer of the
highly successful Portal.) For one, long before the latest
drama, Quinn had been widely seen in the gaming community as a
beneficiary of gaming-media favoritism. The glowing reviews and
awards for Depression Quest, a text-only game that has the
player make day-to-day choices as a depressed person, rankled
gamers who felt that it wasn't even a real videogame but a (dull)
interactive fiction. There was a widespread feeling that it was
getting praised due to "political correctness"—partly for promoting
the socially conscious cause of mental health awareness, partly
because of Quinn's earlier, widely publicized claims of harassment
by users of a forum for depressed men.

Was the resentment against Quinn at least partly related to her
gender? Perhaps—though a male game developer widely seen as
receiving undeserved acclaim, Phil Fish, was more or
less
driven from the field last year by relentless Internet abuse.
(Having made a semi-comeback, Fish was recently targeted by hackers
after publicly supporting Quinn—an incident that has been
cited as proof that men in the gaming world only get
ill-treated when they speak up for women. But Fish's troubles with
haters long predated the Quinn brouhaha.)

In any event, at least some of the anti-Quinn sentiment stemmed
from an incident in which she appears to have engaged in truly
appalling behavior—and which had nothing to do with her gender or
sex life and everything to do with "social justice" zealotry.

Last February, Quinn learned about a women's videogame contest
sponsored by a charity called The Fine Young Capitalists, or
TFYC—artists and entrepreneurs who seek to encourage the creation
of videos and videogames by women and minorities. Women were
invited to submit ideas for videogames; the winner was to work with
TFYC's designers and programmers to develop her concept into a game
and get a cut from its sales. Quinn was outraged by what she felt
was the contestants' "unpaid labor"—but even more so by the rule
requiring transgender participants to publicly identify as female
prior to the start of the contest. In dozens of angry tweets, Quinn accused
TFYC of exploiting women and "policing transwomen's transition
points," then gloated over accidentally crashing their website with
her Twitter storm. (In August, Quinn claimed that she had only
"posted 4 tweets saying I didn't know how I felt about their
approach.") In a
recent interview, a TFYC spokesman said that Quinn later
continued to publicly attack the contest as "exploitative" and
"transphobic," resulting in online harassment toward the group,
loss of financial backing, and the cancelation of several planned
articles about the project. Quinn and her
supporters have
cited a conciliatory statement TFYC issued in late August as a
rebuttal of those accusations; but that statement was a "peace
treaty" TFYC withdrew
a few days later, saying that Quinn had not held up her end of
the bargain.

Of course none of this justifies harassment or threats toward
Quinn. But the full story does not make her a very sympathetic
figure. All of this complicated history has been almost completely
erased from GamerGate coverage in the "progressive" media (gaming
and mainstream), which reduced the Quinn saga to prurient
revelations about her sexual exploits.

Which brings us to the next point:

2. The media ethics issues raised by GamerGate are
valid, not just an excuse for bashing women and their
supporters.

The ethics issue is not that Quinn supposedly slept her way to
good reviews (she did not). Rather, it's excessive coziness between
journalists who cover the videogame industry and certain game
developers who have a "progressive" cachet, a problem
acknowledged by Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo. Among other
things, GamerGate drew attention to the fact that Quinn had
received contributions to help finance Depression Quest
through the Patreon crowdfunding platform from a Kotaku editor and
from a staff writer for another major gaming website, Polygon, who
went on to review the game. Due to these concerns, Kotaku
banned such contributions by its staff while Polygon
adopted a policy requiring reviewers to disclose them.
(Incredibly, one leftist commentator, Samantha Allen, took to
Twitter to attack
these policy changes as motivated by anti-female animus: "These
people did not care about journos being friendly w/devs until those
devs were women.") The extremely one-sided coverage of the
"Quinnspiracy" certainly supports the charges of cliquishness.
Thus, Kotaku reporter Jason Schreier
contacted TFYC after their fundraising page was hacked in
apparent retaliation against hacker attacks on Quinn and her
supporters—but never published anything about their situation or
their conflict with Quinn.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine and the author of Ceasefire: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality (The Free Press) and Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (Ticknor & Fields). Follow her on Twitter at @CathyYoung63

Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time. Report abuses.

Exactly this. I've read about this numerous times in numerous
publications, and still don't understand what's going on. At first
I just thought it was another feminist cause-video games tend to
cater to the young male crowd. But it's obviously not that cut and
dry and to be honest I don't really care enough to try to figure
out what's going on.

Twitter and progressive SJWs make a good match, considering that
most of progressive thought can generally be summed up in less than
140 characters.

Perhaps the best thing for thinking people to do is not use
twitter. It's a communication medium that was invented for 14 year
old girls. So it's not surprising that most of the people on it act
like 14 year old girls.

Queen Bees and Wannabes is a 2002 self-help book by Rosalind
Wiseman. It focuses on the ways in which girls in high schools form
cliques, and on patterns of aggressive teen girl behavior and how
to deal with them. The book was, in large part, the basis for the
movie Mean Girls (2004).[1]

Are you in some obtuse way attempting to argue that teen girls
aren't cliquish and manipulative? That that's just a
stereotype?

If so, just make that argument. You must actually argue that a
stereotype is false before you make claims of sexism. You can't
just assume that everything negative is de facto sexist. (Jesus,
get your leftist catecism right, even I can do it better than
you!!)

Secondly, if you want to make that argument, there are more than
a few sociologists who would like to have a word with you.

Serious question. Do the words "girl," "boy," "teenager," have
any conceptual meaning to you? If they're real, definable, terms,
that means you can describe them. If you describe them in a
negative sense, that doesn't make you a sexist. Even if it is, why
is this a bad thing? Step away from the ad hominems for a second
and address her point. Do 14 year old girls often act in the way
she's describing? Is this different than 14 year old boys? If yes,
why is this sexist? And even if it is sexist, why is her
acknowledging a truth a bad thing? I'll take you seriously when you
address her argument rather than just attacking her character.

Thanks, and by the way, note how "ARealGamer" is reinforcing my
point about progressives.

Instead of substantively engaging my point about how progressive
political tactice resemble those of 14 year old girls, he (or she)
is acting like a 14 year old girl. He (she) is attempting
to use the social power of the term "sexist" to silence the idea,
rather than engage it. Imagine this discussion was taking place on
(say) Jezebel. This person would have an army of syncophants
screaming "sexism" in exactly the same way, just like a high-school
queen bee and her followers.

rather than whether or not the person speaking happens to
have a vagina.

I contend that it is you, not us, that is someone who dwells on
irrelevant items such as a persons gender. After all, you simply
came here and started calling people sexist because "OMG they
questioned the statements of a WOMAN".

No, i called them sexist because they are attempting to justify
rape threats against people who dare to point out that games have a
wider audience than 18-24 year old men.
At which point i was called a "cunt."

This person is a progressive. Having never hard their ideas
challenged in the media in any significant way, they are at a loss
as to what to do when confronted with serious intellectual
criticism. The typical tactic is to flee to charges of racism and
sexism, because they can't cope with serious argument.

Your ability to reconstruct what I actually said to suit your
own prejudices is amazing. Just like a typical progressive. You're
so caught up in your conviction of your own righteousness that you
can't recognize or admit what you've gone completely off the
rails.

Not girls. Progressives. Get it straight. Twitter is the perfect
medium for progressives because their mindset is so similar to that
of a 14 year old girl. It's all about social acceptance, signalling
the correct attitudes and beliefs, ostracizing people who don't,
and generally just harassing people into conformity with the party
line. Twitter is not a medium for having a serious intellectual
discussion. It's a medium for making mean snarky one-liners.

No. "14 year old."
You see "girl" is a gendered term. Try your first post, or your
last, with "14 year old boy" instead. Notice how your rhetoric
reinforces the idea that it is girls, particularly, who are
incapable of reasonable thought?
That would be sexism. By definition.

No. "14 year old."
You see "girl" is a gendered term. Try your first post, or your
last, with "14 year old boy" instead. Notice how your rhetoric
reinforces the idea that it is girls, particularly, who are
incapable of reasonable thought?
That would be sexism. By definition.

Thank you for showing everyone here the sum of the feminist
counter-argument in Gamergate.

Twitter-mobbing is not a typical 14-year-old boy reaction to a
dispute. It's GIRLS who tend to respond to social disputes by
socially ostracizing those they dislike. Boys tend to respond with
physical aggression.

Really? Let's look at a couple immediate examples. Take this
thread, for instance. We have a good deal of mobbing going on,
don't we, complete with words like "cunt" and "retard" being tossed
around.
Care to take a stab at summarizing which gender is doing so? And
from which political perspective?

Really? Let's look at a couple immediate examples. Take
this thread, for instance. We have a good deal of mobbing going on,
don't we, complete with words like "cunt" and "retard" being tossed
around.
Care to take a stab at summarizing which gender is doing so? And
from which political perspective?

I don't think it's mobbing when you go on a forum you know will
disagree with you and then start throwing around moronic
accusations of sexism.

If I went to a feminist forum and said 'Man, all you feminists
sure are morons' me getting attacked would not be 'mobbing.' I
chose to go to hostile territory and behave like a buffoon in that
instance, just like you've done here.

Incidentally, if I went to a feminist forum and started calling
them idiots, I'd get called much worse than 'cunt' or 'retard.' Why
don't you go look at all the sexually charged attacks Shikha Dalmia
got for her article about the idiotic 'affirmative consent'
standard. Feminists started claiming she liked being raped and was
some sort of frigid wench who never had sex.

You're right though. Feminists are noble uberfrau's who are far
above things like mob attacks and gendered insults.

You can't, on the Internet, show whether somebody has a penis or
a vagina with any certainty. I generally believe somebody when they
tell me they are a man or a woman, but if I don't know that person
in meatspace, I don't know for sure.

And from which political perspective?

You come to a libertarian website and cry "SEXIST!" at one of
the first people you interact with. Shit, I dunno, it must be the
Whig party.

I've got to hand it to you: the titanic resolve it takes to
absolutely refuse to engage any and all arguments presented to you
in like fashion and continue to say "SEXISM!" is impressive. Saying
something over and over does not constitute an argument.

Twitter-mobbing is not just a bunch of people disagreeing with
one person, it's an orchestrated tactic designed to socially
ostracize a person. It's where you actively recruit outsiders to
join in. It's relational aggression which is generally primarily
associated with the behavior of high school girls, although it
exists in other context too. High school girls are known for it
though.

Isn't that essentially what happened to female gamers who argued
that the game industry was, in their opinion, sexist? Logically,
that would mean gamergate people argue like 14 year old girls, and
that they are therefore progressives.

It is my long held position that this is what leads to a lot of
the male on female domestic abuse.

Little girls grow up learning to fight with their mouths. Little
boys roll around on the ground ocassionally throwing a punch.

Skip to adulthood realtionship disputes where physical solutions
are frowned upon. An adept female mouthfighter lands a solid,
painful blow on her opponent who, if he is to win the contest,
strikes out in the only way he is competent.

That is in no way an excuse for male on female violence, just an
explanation of the whys of it.

I think this also explains a lot of the sexist comments made by
GamerGaters too. You've got a bunch of proggie SJW types, maybe
disproportionately female, who have a lot of experience with
mouth-fighting up against a bunch of male gamers who don't and the
male gamers end up lashing out with crude sexual comments instead
of taking on, head-on, the tactics the SJWs are using to force
their agenda upon an unwilling audience.

Are young male gamers a group stereotypically thought of as
handling disputes through physical violence? I thought they were
mostly basement dwelling losers who only communicated with real
live people over an internet connection. Maybe not mouth fighting,
but finger fighters, perhaps?

@OneOut: That's only part of the story. The larger problem is
that adult guys no longer have the freedom to "fight with their
mouths," as you put it, the way women still do. If we try it, it
becomes "sexual harassment" and our careers are destroyed.

It amazes me that anyone can actually have a thought process
like this. If so, it shines a light on the failings of modern
education. Please indentify your educational tract so that I may
ensure that none of my decendents follow it.

Please just be Tony trolling. It is beyond my conception that
this can be a real adult out in the working world.

Hell, they ate at a loss when not treated as a Precious
Snowflake, because they never grew up. Their dreams and asperations
are as puerile as the "adventures" in Peter Pan's realm, and for
exactly the same reason.

They still believe that Prosgressiveism, Socialism, and
Communism are something other than thin veneers for fascism. They
still view Che as some kind of Hispanic Tinkerbell, instead of the
brutal sadist that he was.

What I imagined was that it might be useful for someone not
already ideologically committed to see that there is another
perspective on gamergate, one from an actual gamer rather than, as
here, a political shill.
I was not anticipating being called a "cunt," "retard," "pussy,"
nor having to explain to people why it might be considered sexist
to make rape threats. However, y'all managed that. Way to make
gamergate look...well, like precisely what it is.

I am assuming all of this hullabaloo is just to get people fired
up and get some nicely miscontextualized screenshots where all of
the cogent points are drowned out due to a pic of a poorly chosen
expletive.

And I just DO NOT get video game hype, either. Who gives a shit
what kind of review a game received? The only metric that matters
is the fun you have while playing. If you only played
well-advertised games you'd get stuck with Halo, Call of Duty, and
Mario Party.

With new games often costing $60, many people would be less
likely to take a chance on a game that got bad reviews.

Of course free downloadable demos help with this to some extent.
There have been games whose demos were cool enough that I probably
would still have bought the full version, even if the reviews
weren't so great.

These days, if I hear about a game that sounds interesting, I
can just look it up on YouTube and watch a walk-through of a couple
of minutes of it to decide whether I want to buy it.

I've been playing computer games since Pong, and the "gaming
press" has never played any part in how I choose what to buy.

As for the behavior of the leftards who work for those sites, it
reminds me of something Henry Kissinger is alleged to have said
about academic politics: the reason they're so vicious is because
the stakes are so small.

Here is a basic primer on the subject which I'm sure ARealGamer
will be by to rebut point by point any minute now. Or maybe just
hurl more insults and misdirect. Yeah, probably option two.

For a good idea of what the #gamergate people would like to see
check out
this statement fro The Escapist. Page 5 is actually all you
really need to read. It makes clear how very much bullshit the SJWs
are peddling over this issue.

A reprint of the outrageous BS from RealClearPolitics: still
written by a non-gaming right-wing shill who tries to justify the
horrific abuse of Gaters.
No evidence of "corruption." Just sexist crapola from an author who
admits her entire ignorance of the genre and issues in the first
paragraphs.

The implication here is that if every person or organization who
has ever received a threat on Twitter is transformed by that threat
into the party who is in the right, then a lot of people and
organizations you don't like are in the right.

Fred Phelps and his church received threats on Twitter. Were
they in the right?

Scott Peterson received threats on Twitter. Was he in the
right?

Van der Sloot received threats on Twitter. Is he in the
right?

ISIS receives threats on Twitter. Are they in the right?

Let's discuss who is in the right on GamerGate given the
underlying facts. Because the presence of threats on Twitter
doesn't move the needle on that ONE IOTA.

Is this the only tool in your toolbox? Make some accusatory
strawman statement then fall back on "Thanks for proving ....." If
this is the extent of your discussion, then you are a far cry from
the usual reason trolls. Hell, Tony would twist himself into a
logical pretzel to get people worked up around here

Twitter has hundreds of millions of users. That means that on
any issue, there will be at least one tweeter who tweets something
abusive, threatening, and inappropriate.

Finding that one Twitter user and linking to his or her posts
does not constitute an argument.

Here is the bottom line:

A woman who developed a flimsy, trivial game that broke no new
technical ground and achieved no commercial success was given
laudatory press coverage, because the game pushed the right SJW
buttons and because she slept with reviewers.

When that was pointed out, people like you went berserk and
tried to accuse everyone who thought this was scurrilous was a
sexist. You didn't rebut the accusations - because they're true,
you can't. You went right to the only weapon you've got and the
only weapon you ever have. And when that weapon didn't immediately
work - because its application here is transparently absurd - you
didn't back down; you doubled down.

Progressives hate it when their tactics are revealed. I mean,
they think they are super-super smart for the way they manipulate
the media. They think it isn't super-fucking-obvious to everyone
how they operate. The fact that someone noticed this shit is, like,
embarrassing. There must be some alternative explanation for it,
other than that they are morons who aren't nearly as smart or
interesting as they think they are. hence, SEXISM!!!

"...was given laudatory press coverage..."
So your whole complaint is you didn't like the game, and therefore
can't understand why someone else would? And this justifies...what,
exactly? A demand that journalists continue following the same code
of ethics they already have?

Again: there is ZERO proof anybody got good reviews for sleeping
with anyone.
But EVEN if there were - and there isn't - it would only violate
already extant journalistic rules of conduct...not justify the
broader supposed concerns of gamergate which bool down to trying to
remove actual social crotique from games.

I don't think it's the sleeping with the game creator so much as
the idea that this game pushed the right "social justice" buttons
and got those laudatory reviews because it was politically correct,
not because it was actually fun to play.

But this article isn't actually based on the situation, or the
author's knowledge of the genre. She's quite explicit about that
when she declares 'I don't know games, but I know them accursed
libruhls!'
It's no different than Milo Yiannopoullis' jumping on a bandwagon
he thinks he can manipulate into a political windfall.

But this article isn't actually based on the situation,
or the author's knowledge of the genre. She's quite explicit about
that when she declares 'I don't know games, but I know them
accursed libruhls!'

Kathy Young is honest that she isn't interested in the subject,
whereas Anita Sarkeesian is a known liar. Now tell me who's
manipulating this situation into a political windfall - the person
who is honest and writes an honest article about their opinions, or
the person who raised $160,000 via kickstarter and has made a
career by lying about being interested in video games?

Um, A RealGamer: it's not unknown, or inappropriate, for
journalists to write about things of which they have little
first-hand knowledge. They do something called "research" and
summarize what they learn for their audience. Cathy and Milo are
doing nothing wrong, unless you can show they are getting their
facts wrong.

It's especially amusing for you to accuse them of writing so
that they can "manipulate into a political windfall." That, in
essence, has been the career plan of Anita Sarkeesian.

Nor do game critics who think Dragon's Crown should be less
grope-tastic. The difference being, those critics actually play
games and have an investment in their future. 'Reason'
doesn't...it's just making political hay while the sun shines.

The "video games should present a more realistic body image be
cause sexism" shit was added on by feminists and SJWs who've been
bitching about slim chicks with big tits in video games for years
and only has anything to do with Gamergate because they injected
it.

Nor do game critics who think Dragon's Crown should be less
grope-tastic.

Here's an idea--maybe SJWs should design their own games and let
the marketplace determine if they're actually good or not.

Oh, that's right. That actually happened, and the little SJW
queen found that nobody who actually matters--the paying
customer--thought it was any good. No wonder you losers are so
butthurt about all this; it's because you know that you don't have
the talent or the empathy to actually appeal to the people who will
provide you with a livelihood, so you resort to the same old lame
cultural marxism that "this isn't fair, dammit!". You don't have
anything substantive, just more shitlib whinging.

They are so accustomed to having TV and film viewers flock to
whatever the (overwhelmingly leftist) film critics tell them is
good that they are shocked and upset when they discover that gamers
don't actually just automatically like the games that they are told
they should like.

They are so accustomed to having TV and film viewers
flock to whatever the (overwhelmingly leftist) film critics tell
them is good that they are shocked and upset when they discover
that gamers don't actually just automatically like the games that
they are told they should like.

Except that I don't even think this is true. The TV and film
reviewers pimp leftist tripe all the time, but no one bothers
watching it. For all the glowing left-wing discussions of Lena
Dunham, Girls' highest ever ratings were
1.1 million. The Season 3 finale only had 632,000 viewers.

Compare that to
Duck Dynasty. Duck Dynasty is supposedly in a ratings freefall
and they're still pulling in 4.2 million viewers an episode.

Which of those got more glowing reviews from leftists: Duck
Dynasty or Girls? Similarly, Community got great reviews but no one
watched it.

Hold up. First of all, Bioshock's Ryan Andrew was more of an
objectivist, which to be fair is similar to libertarianism. Second
of all, he wasn't even a good objectivist. All of rapture's issues
were caused when Andrew Ryan turned his back on his values. He
became authoritarian, and the city was the furthest thing from
objectivism and libertarianism as it could get.

Third of all, as was said, the game was really fun. The game was
fun first and foremost. That determined success much more than
whatever message it had. Sort of like how the GTA series is so
successful, not due to any one message, but due to how people find
them fun. If you want to put out a game with a message, make sure
it is actually a fun game, because otherwise it won't go
anywhere.

Whatever gamers think the future of games should be they
determine with their dollars. Obviously, tits and ass sell, as do
guns and gore. If they didn't, we wouldn't be having this
discussion.

What Quinn, Sarkeesian, you, or ThinkProgress think or write
isn't relevant to games or the future of games. But you nutcases
are relevant to political discussions, which is why we're talking
about it here at Reason.

My complaint is that when people offered the completely
reasonable and understandable statement that her press coverage
wasn't justified by the game, and used that coverage as an example
of what is wrong with game journalism, people like you IMMEDIATELY
asserted that anyone who would voice such a complaint is a
misogynist monster.

People like you actually declared that the fact that gamers
don't like corrupted reviews is proof that gamers are generally
misogynists and gaming and game development needs to be rebuilt
from the ground up and that all gamers require re-education in the
proper social justice principles.

Classic. Absolutely classic demonstration of how the modern left
works. It's been so long since you actually had to argue (since you
generally argue with cowards in the context of a complacent press
that supports you at every turn) that even when called on it, you
can't shift or pivot or do something else. It's all you've got.

Oddly it's a lot like when someone spends all their gaming time
shooting up bots in single player and then gets utterly pwnd the
moment they encounter real people in an online competition. If
their enemies don't do exactly what they want and expect they are
helpless.

It has been debunked about a million times already. Zoe sleeps
with people for favorable reviews of her "game". Invents
"harassment" to bolster her crumbling credibility. Game journalists
don't see the big deal with the incestuous relationship between
them and the people they review products.

Sarkeesian (sp?) claims to be a gamer, and it's been shown that
she admits to never playing games. Yet she gets a bunch of beta
idiots to follow and fund her bullshit.

Anyone still believing this is some sort of massive assault on
women is either an idiot or part of the deception. Which are
you?

"it has been linked to some very ugly misogynist harassment of
feminists."

Can you prove these internet threats came from men? If not than
the only sexism you have uncovered is your own for assuming men
make threats and women are innocent delicate flowers who could
never do such a thing.

After they get gamer age guys to stop responding to women as sex
objects, what are they going to do next?

Stop the birds from flying south for the winter?

Most of this stuff really does come across as misandry.

It's like they hate men (and boys) for responding to physically
attractive women. ...and then they point to all the physically
attractive women we respond to as if that were conclusive evidence
of our guilt.

Being physically attracted to women isn't anything to be ashamed
of, and making games for people who are physically attracted to
women isn't anything to be ashamed of either.

If sexual attraction works differently in women and men, isn't
it misandrist to insist that men conform to a female norm?

Gluesponge is totally correct.The last Call of Duty game I
bought was the collector's edition of GHOSTS which was over a
hundred dollars, so who do you think Activision is going to cater
to? The person who plays Candy Crush or the one who buys their
products on a regular basis, and who generally buys the most
expensive versions of that product? In the end it comes down to
money, and you are fooling yourself if you think otherwise.

Thank you so much for this article Cathy. I love you as a
reporter, and it means a lot to have someone like you actually
research the gamers' side of the story. So many reporters either
choose to ignore the issue, or only ask the journalist being
accused of corruption their side of the story.
Furthermore, thank you Reason for posting this. I think a lot of
libertarians can sympathize with having their beliefs defined by
their opponents in the main stream media.

How does a rape threat work. You say "I will rape you" on the
internet? And people believe that they will be raped? They believe
the person that said it actually will go find them, and rape them,
and that they're just giving their prey and the police a heads up
to get ready?

Remember when the reddit moderators had to step in from all the
"rape threats" on the xx forum. They announced that nearly all the
threats actually came from female users trying to pretend they were
being attacked and create sympathy. Why wouldn't we expect this is
the same?

Any other threats not self generated are simply not serious and
only frighten retards. If people were actually scared they wouldn't
be flaunting the threats with pride, they would go to the police.
People threaten death all the time, we don't have internet
controversies over that silliness.

It's all just a transparent call to sympathy that only the
simplest of simpletons finds compelling.

It is hinting at deeper knowledge of the underlying issue of
gamergate. Tulpa doesn't usually do this. It's sticking to the
"THAT'S SEXIST!!!111!" because that is the only response
to gamergate feminists have been able to manage.

I'm leaning towards fake account because it showed up like 30
minutes after this was posted. I don't think an actual troll who
wasn't a regular troll would have found this article and created an
account that quickly.

You're right. Which is why no one on this site said they are,
you fucking moron, and you're just using the bad actions of random
morons on twitter because you're not intelligent enough to make a
coherent point.

I'll believe you care about rape threats when you start
attacking all the rape threats and death threats directed towards
Shikha Dalmia, Sarah Palin and a whole host of conservative and
libertarian women. Until then it's fairly obvious you're a poorly
educated liar who is pretending to care about rape threats as a
political cudgel. Kind of like Anita Sarkeesian.

"You're right. Which is why no one on this site said they are,
you fucking moron"

Really?

You might want to look again at this thread. Right above you.
You can start with "I like you. That's why I'm going to rape you
last" and work your way down to here.
Then tell me again how nobody here is treating rape threats as
funny.

This is actually very common in the feminist movement. Many
people have been caught sending fake rape threats to themselves in
order to garner sympathy and de-legitimize the opposition. If
feminists actually thought random internet rape threats were the
major issue they claim, then those same feminists wouldn't dilute
the seriousness of rape threats by making fake ones.

Hey, I'm kind of an Objectivist. Not a real one, but maybe a
post-Objectivist. If someone calls me a Randroid, then I really
can't object.

That's one of the things that is most annoying about this
dispute.

Arealgamer INSISTS that the reason I'm on the side that I'm on
is because I oppose ALL social criticism in games.

But BIOSHOCK is essentially a long-form hate letter saying,
"Fluffy, you are fucking scum!" over and over and over. It
criticizes me directly much more than any stupid hippie feminist
non-competitive cooperation game ever could.

But I happily concede that BIOSHOCK is a fucking awesome game.
It has an awesome plot, immersive gameplay, a combat system that
was innovative at the time, and incredible art design and
visuals.

But liking BIOSHOCK doesn't count, I guess. To prove that I'm
not an evil gamergater I guess I have to show up and proclaim how
much I love games where everybody weaves baskets and shares a
lot.

But I happily concede that BIOSHOCK is a fucking awesome
game. It has an awesome plot, immersive gameplay, a combat system
that was innovative at the time, and incredible art design and
visuals.

You must have played a different (patched?) version of BS than I
did, because the version I played had terrible enemy AI, an art
direction and graphics that was really grating and aged like a
cheap whore, and had a bizarre difficulty curve. Oh, and many of
the plasmids sucked. It was at best a clunky corridor shooter. It
should have been a movie then I would have been spared a game that
is not just the most overrated I have ever played by objectively
pretty bad.

My position is that since every party to every dispute that is
adjudicated on Twitter receives at least one threat, threats on
Twitter don't matter to the substance of any dispute and should be
ignored.

And that if someone tries to defend their weak position by
pointing to Twitter threats, to them claim, "Obviously my opponents
must be evil; evil people are threatening me! Therefore I am right
and you all must concede I am right!" that someone is
intellectually dishonest and contemptible and deserves scorn and
mockery, not sympathy or support.

Remember when the reddit moderators had to step in from all
the "rape threats" on the xx forum. They announced that nearly all
the threats actually came from female users trying to pretend they
were being attacked and create sympathy. Why wouldn't we expect
this is the same?

Yeah, that's the Meg Lanker-Simmons gambit. It's
possible that some of these alleged threats really did
come from people unknown to the women in question, but nobody seems
to be looking into who's making them.

I've been on the internet since the mid 1980s, and I've had some
rather lurid threats tossed my way, including two that mentioned
where I was living or working at the time.

To date however, despite having been threatened by a whole
vaudeville show's worth of Nazis, Scientologits, tree-huggers,
vegeterrorists, Rush Limbaugh fans, Bill Clinton worshippers,
Obamunists, and several other categories of idiots too
insignificant to mention, nobody has shown up to take a shot at me.
Hell, nobody's even TP'd my house.

When all is said and done, a great deal more is said than done.
If these women really are in fear for their lives, then they should
get some firearms training and learn how defend themselves in an
emergency.

I wasn't on the net until a few years after that. In 1983,
USENET mostly consisted of people involved in the computer industry
or academia, and the signal to noise ratio was a whole lot better
than it is today.

That's true. The threats I'd be worried about would be threats
to expose my attempted-anonymous comments to my employer, family,
neighbors -- something that would be easy, noncoercive, and
perfectly legal if someone knew my name and address. And those
threats are exceedingly rare.

Doxxing is not new. And it's not the SJW's last line of
"defense", it's their first, and several SJW's claimed it was
legitimate (Adam Sessler admitted as much in a Q&A forum at one
of the big game tradeshows.)

For some, the attacks on Quinn and on Sarkeesian became a
perfect storm of gaming-culture misogyny. On August 28, Gamasutra
ran a blistering attack on "game culture" by feminist cultural
critic Leigh Alexander, declaring that "gamers are over" and
ridiculing them as socially inept, badly dressed young males
addicted to mindless gadget-buying and "getting mad on the
Internet." This was followed by a spate of online articles—both on
sites devoted to gaming or "geek culture" and in general-interest
publications such as Vice and The Daily Beast—attacking gamer
culture or announcing its demise.

So, wait. SJWs, upset with the stereotypical depiction of women
in games, respond with a stereotypical depiction of gamers?

I kind of theorize that being a SJW is attractive to people who
are horrible human beings. Especially if you are a woman, being an
SJW lets you behave terribly and then be in the moral high ground
when someone calls you out on it. If you view the world as
despising you for your vagina, then you can dismiss all valid
criticism as sexism. Then add in all the atta-boys you get from
your fellow clanswomen for your behavior, and it's really not that
hard to see why people would be attracted to it.

The funny part is that many "gamers" actually think this is some
corruption that has infected the "video game media." Which just
proves how wrapped up in games these people are because this sort
of progressive leftist bullshit has infected nearly all media and
half of Americans. The video gamers discovered reality but still
don't believe it.

No, they discovered reality, believe it, and are fighting it,
which is precisely what has the SJWs so apoplectic. SJWs are used
to getting their way when they scream sexism or racism and that
they aren't this time is infuriating to them.

What pisses off the SJWs even more is that many of the
gamergaters are using the same twitter mob tactics favored by
them.

You guys don't have a history of blocking people who make stupid
irrational sequences of statements. Which makes me doubt that
blocking Tulpa is due to alleged irrationality of his arguments.
No, with him it's different.

There are atheists like me who just don't believe in gods and
don't care much about convincing anyone else to abandon their
superstitions, and there are atheists like PZ Myers' fans who
apparently derive a certain level of glee from poking anthills with
sticks.

I think the anthill-pokers are a minority of atheists, but I
don't know if anyone's taken a poll to find out.

I wouldn't say an awful lot. In my experience, yes, you have a
vocal subculture of quasi-fascist military sci-fi fans who will eat
up the latest iteration of "Kill the Space Muslims!" saga by folks
like Ringo or MZW, but they have a long way to go before you could
call them the schwerpunkt of the fandom. Indeed, you have
legions upon legions of sci-fi fans who say, Brin, has the right
idea when it comes to what he considers "democracy" (aka "social").
Remember, he wrote the Postman because he believes that's
how libertarianism would actually work out!

Science fiction fandom doesn't seem to have struck back
to the same degree.

*blinks*

Have you read an issue of Asimov's or Analog
in, I don't know, say the past 30 years? The overlap ratio between
sci-fi fandom (actual fandom, as in "I read the latest Ken Liu
story and then had a great discussion about it with James Patrick
Kelly at the hotel bar during FanCon" ... not "I watched BSG on
SyFy") and SJW approaches 1:1.

Have you read an issue of Asimov's or Analog in, I
don't know, say the past 30 years? The overlap ratio between sci-fi
fandom (actual fandom, as in "I read the latest Ken Liu story and
then had a great discussion about it with James Patrick Kelly at
the hotel bar during FanCon" ... not "I watched BSG on SyFy") and
SJW approaches 1:1.

This just isn't true. If it were, why are Larry Correia and Baen
Books so popular? Military sci-fi is among the best selling
varieties and I hardly think military sci-fi is
pro-progressive.

Weber and Drake are two of my favorites. I devoured The
Fleet in my younger days, for example. But again, what is he
doing outside of the Baen-verse? Again, open a issue of Asimov's or
any of the British 'zines. Tell me if you see anything that is even
like Weber in there. Who are they giving Hugos and Nebulas too? Not
Weber and Drake, or even Eric Flint...but Kij Johnson, "Red" Kim
Stanley Robinson, Ken Liu, and fucking Paolo Bacigalupi. Seriously,
the acclaim that was heaped upon Bacigalupi for his terrible
The Windup Girl just shows how infested the fandom is with
SJW. (*I would still recommend a hate-read of The Windup Girl, and
then followed by a viewing of "The World of Suzie Wong" so you can
see the original story he plagiarized before spewing his
post-colonialist, the White man rapes everything on Gaia bullshit
over it)

This 'bickering' is how you fight cultural issues. BTW GamerGate
was enough to get Intel to pull advertising from a website critical
of GG.

How about you come up with an example where the SJWs attacked a
constituency that didn't already hate them and that group DID
complain and as intensively and got the equivalent of Intel to drop
advertising. You are the one who should really have the burden of
proof.

This is why I wanted Reason to cover GamerGate. The people
making up the movement are an actual cross section of Gamers, which
means realistically they are a cross section of the population
under 35. The libertarians and conservatives in the movement
already knew about media bias and how pervasive it is, but the
people on the left of the movement are experiencing being demonized
by the media for the first time in their lives.

This is an amazing opportunity to get many of them to question
some of their fundamental beliefs about how they gather information
in the world. Very few will ever be able to go fully back to
dismissing their opponents claims of being misrepresented by
mainstream news sources after having experienced it themselves.
Reason posting a fair and balanced article while the NYT posts a
horribly biased article just goes to further emphasize in the
leftist side of the movements minds that there may be something
wrong with how they view the world. I'm watching person after
person questioning if they've entered the twilight zone, because
they have never thought it possible that the people they've been
laughing at this whole time might actually be telling the truth.
It's a wonderful thing to watch.

It's raining outside. I say this is great because we've been in
a drought and the rain will help the plants. I later say the rain
is great because it means I'll get to sleep faster. You then say
that the real reason I'm happy its raining is not because I care
about the plants but because I want to be able to sleep easier.

I'm allowed to like something that is occurring for multiple
reasons without invalidating any single one of those reasons. In
fact, it is human nature to have more than one reason to like or
dislike any single thing. We have big brains and they are generally
used to evaluate a situation based upon multiple criteria.

Actually he's saying that he's happy with gamergate because it
showed the fact that your side is loaded with narcissistic liars
who manipulate the media through threats of legal action,
incestuous relationships with the subjects of articles, and wild
claims of sexism.

You pretty much summed it up man. For years i was a
liberal/progressive perhaps even almost becoming a bit of a SJW but
i am also a gamer and when this whole thing broke which ive been
following since the start and after being attacked called sexist,
racist and compared with the KKK etc. The only people that where
willing to come into bat for gamers against an onslaught of shit
where conservatives and libertarians. After seeing the disgusting
SJW world for what it really is its made me question all my
beliefs. For the longest time i had a dislike for conservatives and
even libertarians without barely even understanding what they where
about but now i get it man, i really get it. Now i cant stand
seeing even politicians being called sexist and racist for even the
most benign shit and this overly PC shit is creeping into almost
every part of life and its these SJW types that push it the
hardest.

Really? Let's look at a couple immediate examples. Take this
thread, for instance. We have a good deal of mobbing going on,
don't we, complete with words like "cunt" and "retard" being tossed
around.

I have read the substance of your posts and have concluded that
I hate you.

And here's the thing: it's entirely fair for me to do that. I am
living up to Martin Luther King's dream. I am not judging you by
the color of your skin, OR by your gender, but by the content of
your character (as revealed by statements you voluntarily made in a
public forum).

Although I haven't called you either of these names yet, I
might. And when I do, it won't be misogyny. It will be my personal
dislike of you expressing itself in an insult. Naturally, since I
don't like you, I'll choose an insult you won't like. You've
telegraphed for me which insults you like the least, so I will
probably use one of those.

cultist zealots who enforce the party line with the
fervor of Mao's Red Guards, though luckily without the real-life
power.

Make no mistake though, the real power is what these assclowns
really want. These are people who view anyone who disagrees with
them as backwards sub-human garbage that they would gladly load
onto cattle cars by the thousands. All in the name of "tolerance"
of course.

Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols which
have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden.

Nudity in any form is prohibited, as is indecent or undue
exposure.

Suggestive and salacious illustration or suggestive posture is
unacceptable.

Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any
physical qualities.

Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed.
Rape scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable.

Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested.

Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly
forbidden.

Nudity with meretricious purpose and salacious postures shall
not be permitted in the advertising of any product; clothed figures
shall never be presented in such a way as to be offensive or
contrary to good taste or morals.

This is pretty weak. As problematic as Quinn's activity in the
industry may be, the author goes out of her way to avoid discussing
how extensively her sexual relationships were used in the
critiques. It's very hard not to see this as a spurned boyfriend
and a bunch of sympathetic neckbeards who went after her. Quinn was
and still is, small time in the industry. How many millions of
units is she pushing? How many people does she have on staff in
development, PR, and legal? What's her budget for her next project?
She might be a gadfly, but she's not Electronic Arts, Sony, or
Nintendo.

The author also gives zero justification for the attacks on
Sarkesian, who's just a cultural critic.

Finally, even if everything alleged by the 'gaters were true,
wouldn't the libertarian response (this is a libertarian website,
after all), be to, I don't know, not buy the games or visit the
websites you found problematic?

Finally, even if everything alleged by the 'gaters were
true, wouldn't the libertarian response (this is a libertarian
website, after all), be to, I don't know, not buy the games or
visit the websites you found problematic?

The libertarian response would be to not visit the websites you
find problematic while also broadcasting your displeasure using
your first amendment rights. Which they're doing.

Also, Quinn is small time, but the argument is that the
websites aren't small time. She's just an
examples of a general problem people have with the press
itself.

I also think the attacks on Sarkeesian (with the exception of
actual threats which are always inexcusable) are justified because
she a) lied about her interest in games b) raised over $100,000 on
kickstarter which she used to produce like 5 videos in two years
and c) has been attacking gamers based on what amounts to
Sarkeesian's fraud.

You guys don't seem to get how the press works. I get the
impression that you guys think every article and review should be
done with scientific precision, followed by a long list of
disclaimers about how the author is the second cousin to the game
developers roommate. News stories happen because sources and
writers socialize and interact in informal ways. They've attended
the same schools, go to the same bars, and, yes, sometimes they
even date.

You know, if the attacks on Sarkeesian amounted to leaving
comments on her videos that were the equivalent of "You're full of
shit", that would be life in the digital age. But they went far
beyond that. Also, no one has been able to explain how Sarkeesian's
videos are causing anyone harm beyond making them "feel bad." There
are lots of cultural critics on the internet, spewing all kinds of
shit. Grow a thicker skin.

I get the impression that you guys think every article
and review should be done with scientific precision, followed by a
long list of disclaimers about how the author is the second cousin
to the game developers roommate.

That is what actual journalists do guy.

This wouldn't be an issue if:

A. They hadn't been pushing an (as you admit) unknown game
developer because she pushed the right SJW buttons and did so
by lying about their reviewing method and;

B. Hadn't also apparently been fucking the developer and
conveniently forgot to mention this fact.

There are lots of cultural critics on the internet,
spewing all kinds of shit. Grow a thicker skin.

Really? That's what actual journalists do? Go to the NYT, the
WSJ, WaPo, Politico, FoxNews, and any number of other news sources.
Look at their political coverage and their opinion pages. Do you
see disclaimers? Do you see conflicts of interest listed?
Meanwhile, the writers and their subjects all socialize at the same
bars and restaurants in Manhattan and Dupont Circle, they all went
to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton together, their kids all go to the
same prep schools, etc., etc.

Really? That's what actual journalists do? Go to the
NYT, the WSJ, WaPo, Politico, FoxNews, and any number of other news
sources. Look at their political coverage and their opinion pages.
Do you see disclaimers? Do you see conflicts of interest
listed?

When any of those entities don't mention conflicts of interest
they are behaving unethically.

Here's the issue: Modern journalism is highly politicized and
highly unethical. It is dishonest and wrong for a journalist to
write an article on a subject without mentioning any particular
conflicts of interest.

Incidentally, even though there's a great deal of corruption in
modern journalism, a lot of media sites DO comment on what could be
legitimate and glaring conflicts of interest. Reason mentions their
relationship to the Kochs when they write anything related to them.
I see journalists say 'In the interests of disclosure...' all the
time when they are writing about a person or entity with whom they
have a romantic and/or financial relationship.

That's incredibly common, so I don't know what news sites you
read if you don't know they frequently do mention conflicts of
interest.

I don't understand why you're having trouble understanding the
concept that all of the modern media may be corrupt and that we
shouldn't be okay with gaming media corruption just because they're
following the corruption of the rest of the press.

If the media wants to see itself as a noble arbiter of truth,
I'm going to hold them to the standards they claim for
themselves.

Ok, I'm going to make a confession. I think games are kind of
dumb. And I think gamers who are getting worked up about this need
to get out of the basement and shave their neckbeards off. And the
reason I'm so antagonized is that we have much more serious issues
in our society when it comes to a corrupt press, and it's
disappointing to see that the only thing that gets you all worked
up is the possibility that someone might have taken some kind of
payola to write a positive review about a shitty game.

You're not exactly making your case here. No one on this site
has any love for the mainstream press for precisely this reason.
You're really just hawking up a tu quoque argument as if it
validates the lack of ethics of the gaming press.

Informal relationships garnered by journalists and politicos
hanging out in the same bar is not the same thing as
writing a positive review for a product created by somebody that
you were fucking.

Look up full disclosure and get back to us.

Also, I'll give you that genuine relationships
(boyfriend/girlfriend, marriages) are problematic, and the writer
shouldn't cover the subject. But it's a lot of this more informal
contact that I describe that really drives the press.

Translation: 'gaters have a genuine beef in this case I just
don't like it so I'm going to talk about something else that is
tangentially related.

Go to the NYT, the WSJ, WaPo, Politico, FoxNews, and any
number of other news sources. Look at their political coverage and
their opinion pages. Do you see disclaimers? Do you see conflicts
of interest listed?

Right.

And we HATE that.

And we HATE the journalists you're describing.

I would like nothing better than to see them all professionally
and personally destroyed. I would celebrate that ecstatically.

And what happened in Gamergate is that marginal members of a
marginal area of the press got a little too slipshod about covering
their tracks, and ended up in a buzzsaw.

And even though it's not the New York Times or their journalists
getting sawed into little pieces, I'm still delighted. Maybe this
will catch on. Maybe people will see what gamers have been able to
do, and will do it to the Washington Post. That would be
fantastic.

But that can't happen if the gamers lose. If the gamers lose,
then the left and the press will prove that if they just stick
together and yell SEXIST loud enough, they can defeat any
criticism, even when the actions in question should admit of no
defense. And so naturally I don't want to see that happen.

What makes me so antagonized by you folk is that I don't
understand why you can't get motivated about something that, you
know, matters. Sorry, I just think games are kind of dumb. I put
them in the same category as those terrible thriller novels they
sell at airport newsstands.

They really let it get away from them at the end. 2 1/2 years
later and I'm still pissed at the last 10 minutes of ME3 (which was
possibly the greatest game I ever played up to that point). I
haven't bothered to play any of them at all ever since, and that
was either my favorite or second favorite video game series of all
time.

Also, I'll give you that genuine relationships
(boyfriend/girlfriend, marriages) are problematic, and the writer
shouldn't cover the subject. But it's a lot of this more informal
contact that I describe that really drives the press.

This is idiotic. I don't need to 'grow a thicker skin' because I
don't personally care much about Anita Sarkeesian. My point is that
the attacks on her are justified, not that I personally give a fuck
about taking part in those attacks.

Secondly, this isn't about 'scientific precision' it's about
admitting that you're, for example, sleeping with the person whose
game you are reviewing. If someone wrote a pro-Koch brothers
article and didn't disclose that they were fucking one of the
Koch's daughters, it seems to me that would be a breach of
journalistic ethics. There's a reason that whenever they write
about the Kochs Reason says 'We are partially funded through the
Reason foundation which receives some money from Koch Industries.'
This is basic ethics, and it is ethics which are ignored by the
game journalists.

Also, 'sources and writers' may interact, but if you're making
an article in which someone IS THE SUBJECT you should explain any
conflict of interest. Fucking somebody and then writing a glowing
review of a product they created is unethical. How can you not
understand this basic fact?

The gaming industry isn't going to stop making games people like
voluntarily, but they may well be forced to, through rating
systems, taxes, and other restrictions. Just look at what Obama has
been doing to campuses.

Feminists have been calling for changes about a great many thing
for quite some time now. Apart from a few token victories here and
there what's changed? Pardon me but I don't see Blizzard coming out
with the game The Adventures of Captain Todd Sensitive
anytime soon. Nor have rappers stopped talking about "tappin' dat
azz", right?

Well, if two people perform equally in the military, the man
WILL be kicked out for performing below standard because women are
more valuable as a gender according to the US government. Texas
police were sued by the justice department because equal physical
standards in the police are considered sexist. Women receive
disproportionate opportunities in education despite making up a
higher percentage of college students, getting hired at a higher
rate, and working less. Women's cancer receives 15 times the
government funding as men's cancer.

I'd say feminists have been very effective at creating a world
that favors them while claiming victim hood.

The gaming press has trotted her out at every possible event and
occasion as some kind of holy savior, and use her nasty,
sex-negative, anti-violence, anti-escapist views to apply pressure
on developers who make games or art they consider "problematic"
through unlabeled opinion pieces that are absolutely drenched in
ignorance and bile.

You literally cannot deny that this has happened, or that the
people behind/around Sark want to increase their influence.

Also, it's nice to see someone finally be honest about why they
dislike Sarkeesian. It's that you're concerned she'll be taken
seriously enough that the kind of games you like won't be made
anymore. As opposed to a lot of double talk.

Also, it's nice to see someone finally be honest about
why they dislike Sarkeesian

I dislike Sarkeesian because she is a liar and because
I suspect she is a fraud as well (i.e., I think she is courting
controversy for the money and she is faking threats against
herself).

I am concerned about her because her kind of lies and
propaganda lure people in and often end up hurting people.

My concern doesn't validate her position in any way. I am
concerned about people advocating eugenics, but that doesn't
validate eugenics (eugenics was another favorite of progressives
and the American left for a while).

Finally, even if everything alleged by the 'gaters were
true, wouldn't the libertarian response (this is a libertarian
website, after all), be to, I don't know, not buy the games or
visit the websites you found problematic?

Actually, the entire problem people had with Quinn was that she
was being pushed in the press as a significant and important
developer even though she is a nonentity in all of the ways you
list.

So basically you're agreeing with the gamergate argument while
trying to use that agreement as a rebuttal...which is kind of
weird.

Also, you seem to be claiming that if the reason people become
aware that you slept your way into good press is one of the people
you slept with drops a dime on you, everyone should ignore it. And
that is kind of an interesting moral theory. So it's not the action
we should consider, but how we learn of the action? Hey, you could
persuade me of that, since it sounds distantly like a due-process
issue.

But the problem with that defense is that it only works for
Quinn. It doesn't work for her allies in the press. If anything, it
makes her allies in the gamer press look worse.

But seriously, barring cases when there was violence, real or
alleged, and someone was just a really shitty husband/boyfriend,
can you think of an instance where that person suffered,
professionally? Publicly?

But seriously, barring cases when there was violence,
real or alleged, and someone was just a really shitty
husband/boyfriend, can you think of an instance where that person
suffered, professionally? Publicly?

She didn't suffer professionally at all for the stories of her
being a bad girlfriend. However, since you asked, why don't we talk
about Ted
Hughes who was blamed for Sylvia Plath's death until he died in
1988.

Feminists literally blamed him for murder, even though he had
nothing to do with the suicide. On multiple occasions, people have
gone to Sylvia Plath's tombstone, which reads 'Sylvia Plath
Hughes,' and scraped off the 'Hughes' part out of hatred of
Ted.

So yes, I can think of an instance in which an allegedly shitty
husband suffered publicly. Want me to give you more examples?

Also, you want to know the real reason Quinn got pushed by the
press? The same reason that the film press pushes a new "indie
darling" every year.

If you're a gaming journalist, reviewing an incremental
improvement over a previous release (Madden 12, Madden 13, etc.),
becomes pretty boring. The big companies expect gamers to shell out
another $60 for what? So along comes someone with a genuinely
different idea, and you get excited, and you push it.

The author also gives zero justification for the attacks on
Sarkeesian, who's just a cultural critic.

There's no justification for the threats of violence (assuming
those are real). There's plenty for the attacks on her assumptions
and charges. She's basically trying to make a career out of being a
neo-Puritan busybody, telling other people what they should and
should not do.

No one is allowed to criticize her critiques, because since
she's a woman doing so is immediately declared by the rest of the
gamer press and the feminist Twittersphere to be per se evidence of
misogyny.

She is lumped in with Quinn because she is yet another marginal
gaming personality using her gender and political affiliations as a
protective shield to malign anyone who disagrees with her by
describing them as bigots.

It would be weak if you were not describing a straw man. But the
controversy is not about gamers vs Quinn as the article clearly
states (even in bold). When critiques of this relationship of Quinn
to the media turned into an attack by the media, and efforts to
censor- the controversy was born. The libertarian response could
also be to write an article.

When those sexual relationships became the basis for her entire
persona (getting good reviews from journalists she slept with,
etc.) and her incessant desire to paint everyone as misogynist
bastards who disagreed with journalists sleeping with subjects of
their journalism.

Sarkesian claimed to be a gamer and painted herself as a gamer.
Then a video comes out that shows her SAYING she never gamed
before. She hates the fact that people have found out she's a liar
and don't believe anything else she says about a subject she
ADMITTED to knowing nothing about.

There's a list of game websites that were complicit. I and many
gamers no longer frequent those sites. And if it were to end there,
that'd be fine. But the SWJ's and feminist assholes continue to try
and stifle the hobby and whine about depictions of this or that in
games.

It's just a game. SWJ's think it's real life. And they think
they can tell me what to play. Wrong answer.

Why on Earth would I start a column with this thesis? There is no
faster way to alienate my audience—that is, the people who pay my
bills. And yet, this is exactly what writers at not one but half a
dozen online gaming publications did to their audiences last week,
and it points to a significant shift in the business of gaming.
Gamers are not over, but gaming journalism is.

And then end:

Gaming journalists are caught between capitalist
reality and their own frustrated aspirations to be serious cultural
critics. But they cannot solve their problems by preaching about
the death of their audience. That audience is dying only in that it
is leaving them, a process the journalists have evidently decided
to accelerate. Game journalists are rage-quitting their meal
ticket.

The proper libertarian response is to start a public rape threat
for higher business. Obviously there is a great need for someone to
threaten rape against SJW's o because they keep having to threaten
themselves.

It is frustrating that this image exists, but it's
nothing anyone can help. It's a status quo thing and a mass media
thing and those are always hard to shift. But people who completely
aren't helping the case at all are the ones who take an almost
revolutionary pride in their "gamer" status. "I am gamer", they
say, "hear me whine". If you want an example of the kind of person
I'm talking about, click on the comments link down below, and
there'll probably be a few who fell for the bait in the last
paragraph and are now arguing over the correct spelling of whatever
that flaky bint's name was. These are the people who hurl abuse at
film critics who question the artistic potential of games and send
death threats to Jack Thompson - which only proved his point.
Whatever happened to that guy, by the way? I guess after he got
disbarred he slipped back down to the "strange man yelling from
porch" level on The Sims career track for Moral Guardians.

-and-

Anyone who calls themselves a girl gamer is basically wearing a
sandwich board saying "LOOK AT ME." Then, in smaller letters
underneath, "POSSIBLE DADDY ISSUES." Then a semi-colon, then "WAAA"
in brackets.

It is no surprise that one of the worstest, douchiest reviewers
on the net-if you can even call his 'reviews' reviews-would focus
on something as insipid and banal as the internet trolls that
inhabit EVERY CORNER OF THE INTERNET as if it were some unique
problem for the image of gamers.

Okay, I put my hands up, he has me there. I do point out
every little thing that's bad about a game, but then, I'm a critic,
it'd be weird if I didn't. If I put people's balls in my mouth for
a living, I'd be a prostitute, or possibly a GameSpot employee, but
I criticize, so I'm a critic. And I don't believe in scores because
I don't believe a complex opinion can be represented
numerically.

One group, labeled as 'SJWs', critiques games.
The other group, GamerGate, threatens women with rape and
murder.
Is it really so hard to see which side is better, dear social
conservatives masquerading as libertarians?
If you support Gamergate you are objectively evil.

The arguments from the pro-SJW side are so obviously emotional,
mindless, and designed to poison the well that it's impossible to
take you people seriously.

Feminists claim any woman who is conservative or libertarian is
a frigid bitch or a rape apologist, as they have done with
Christina Hoff Sommers, Shikha Dalmia, and Kathy Young. Feminists
send false rape threats to themselves in order to make it appear as
if any criticism of them is illegitimate. Feminists argue any man
accused of rape should be imprisoned, as they did in the Duke
Lacrosse case, and then behave as if anyone who has a problem with
this is a misogynist and a rape apologist.

These facts have been well documented. You can point out the
incredibly bad behavior of certain members of any group, but that
does not inherently delegitimize the legitimate claims being made.
The fact that some people are not intelligent enough to understand
this doesn't make those of us who aren't morons 'objectively
evil.'

Yes and she gets called an evil racist woman hater when she
writes articles against progressive assaults on free speech. In
fact, a male feminist on twitter claimed ENB hates women and gays
because ENB told him it's wrong to insult women for being
Republicans! Kind of proves my point about the problems with modern
feminism, don't you think?

Also, once again you ignored my points, all of which destroyed
your idiotic argument, and argued about something completely
tangential.

I was wrong when I said you have IQ of a stupid newt. You have
the IQ of a tree stump.

You're astonishing. I post large amounts of facts and arguments,
end the post by calling you an idiot (which you've proven yourself
to be) and you claim I'm engaging in ad hominems.

Once again, you're too dumb to know the definitions of the words
you're using. An ad hominem is when someone simply says 'I don't
have to listen to you because you're conservative/liberal/stupid.'
You know, like you engaged in when you claimed anyone arguing in
favor of GamerGaters is 'objectively evil' without providing
supporting evidence.

On the other hand, providing arguments and ending those
arguments with an insult is not an ad hominem. It's a rational
argument directed towards a moron which ends with the writer
correctly identifying him as a moron.

You know, like I've been doing. You should learn to read and
then learn the meaning of the words you try to use. There's nothing
more embarrassing than someone incorrectly identifying a logical
fallacy and thinking he's made a point.

You don't understand the arguments being made. The point is that
you can't argue an entire group is evil based on some individuals
of that group.

Go to Christina Hoff Sommers page and see the things that are
said to her. Go to Dana Loesch's page and see what's said to her.
Go to Charles C.W. Cooke's pages and see the hysterical shit sent
to him from progressives.

Attacks on twitter happen to everyone, some of them involving
violent threats. The primary difference is that the SJWs appear to
be such petulant narcissists that they imagine it only happens to
them and only happens because they're women.

An awful lot of terms that have meaning were originated by the
opponents of a group.

The term capitalism was invented by Karl Marx. Mercantalism was
invented by Adam Smith. Both people hated the system which they
invented a word to describe.

SJW isn't a term they adopted themselves, but it's a term which
accurately describes them. Grouping them together under such a term
is completely reasonable when they believe the same things and act
in similar ways.

An awful lot of terms that have meaning were originated
by the opponents of a group.

To follow up on this point, a chair did not name itself a chair,
yet we call them chairs based on similarities between every chair.
SJWs may not have named themselves, but they're similar enough that
a catchall pejorative makes sense.

I dunno, read the other four replies describing exactly why
labeling a group of similarly-minded individuals who act and react
in a similar fashion forces legitimacy upon the label. You are as
much defined by your opponents as you define yourself in the social
and political arena.

One group, labeled as 'SJWs', critiques games.
The other group, GamerGate, threatens women with rape and
murder.
Is it really so hard to see which side is better, dear social
conservatives masquerading as libertarians?
If you support Gamergate you are objectively evil.

No, the other group does not do that.

If the fact that you can find people on Twitter issuing threats
means that the ENTIRE GROUP issued those threats, then anyone who
opposed Fred Phelps and his church is responsible for the threats
the Westboro Baptist Church received. Did you disagree with the
positions of the Westboro Baptist Church? Uh-oh, that means you
threatened murder on Twitter, I guess.

The fact that you fail to understand this simple fact leads me
to conclude that you are collectivist scum. Also a fucking retard -
but I guess I repeat myself.

It also makes me fucking laugh that you think I'm a social
conservative.

Libertarianism and feminism have fuck all to do with each other.
Libertarians argue human rights, feminists argue pseudo history to
advance privileges for women but not men. When feminists give a
fuck about selective service I'll believe they're more than a
extremist organization when they're not run by extremists pushing a
one sided agenda. Which has never happenned.

Is it really so hard to see which side is better, dear
social conservatives masquerading as libertarians?
If you support Gamergate you are objectively evil.

Just because you didn't use his name doesn't mean you weren't
personally attacking him. You can't say 'everyone who believes x is
an objectively evil social conservative' and then when someone says
'I believe x and am not a social conservative' say 'Well I wasn't
talking about you.'

Let's say I was a racist and said 'All black people are stupid.'
Then when a black guy said 'I have a Ph.D in Micro-biology,' I
replied 'Well I wasn't personally attacking you.' You can't attack
an entire group of people and then say you weren't attacking them
individually, you idiot.

Irish, if you reread my original post perhaps you'll see that I
never said there are only SJWs and rape threateners. I just
compared 2 groups.
For comparison: If I compared Israel and Palestine, and then said
which state is better, I obviously don't say those are the only
nations on Earth.

One group, labeled as 'SJWs', critiques games.
The other group, GamerGate, threatens women with rape and
murder.
Is it really so hard to see which side is better, dear social
conservatives masquerading as libertarians?
If you support Gamergate you are objectively evil.

"You know, Fluffy, you misread my post if you think I'm saying
there's only two groups. Obviously there's a third group, that
knows that the SJW group is totally wrong but doesn't engage in
threats of rape and murder!"

Write exactly that, and I will then say,

"Well, gee, Gweskoyen, I sure am sorry that I flipped out on you
and accused you of saying that I was someone who liked to threaten
women on the internet. Gosh, what a silly mistake I made!"

Your spin on this issue is laughable. You claimed that ANYONE
WHO SUPPORTED Gamergate was an 'objectively evil social
conservative.' You said they are 'social conservatives pretending
to be libertarians.'

That is in your initial post. You cannot now pretend you weren't
calling us social conservatives when that's the exact argument you
made.

The other group, GamerGate, threatens women with rape
and murder.
Is it really so hard to see which side is better, dear social
conservatives masquerading as libertarians?If you support Gamergate you are objectively
evil.

You did not say Gamergate is objectively evil. You said 'if you
SUPPORT' gamergate you're objectively evil. Why don't you reread
your own post and realize that I'm arguing against exactly what you
said.

If you wish to backtrack, that's fine. Just admit you were wrong
in your initial post. Just don't pretend I'm misinterpreting it
when I can literally scroll up and see that I'm not.

I define "Gamergate" as "that group of gamers who believes that
game reviewing that is rooted in personal relationships or in a
desire to advance a particular left-wing feminist critique of
gaming is corrupt."

Gweskoyen, apologize say you misspoke and that you will not use
such logical fallacies in the future. If you aren't just a troll
it's the only way you can honestly defend your position in the rest
of the thread. People's opinions of your position and intelligence
will go way up if your willing to say sorry when you screw up.

You'll have to be very specific about your definition of
"feminism" to convince anyone of that claim. How do you get from
the non-aggression principle to suing employers if they don't meet
"diversity" quotas?

Also, I've been threatened with death by anonymous people on the
internet when I've disagreed with them. The difference between me
and SJWs is that I'm not enough of a delusional nutcase with a
martyr complex to believe that a random asshole on the internet
seriously has the capacity or the desire to do me harm.

Stop elevating the delusions and psychoses of people like Anita
Sarkeesian to the level of objective fact. It shows that you're
objectively gullible and easily manipulated.

"Random assholes on the Internet" are real people you know, and
if they threaten to rape someone with the corpse of their husband,
as happened with Brianna Wu, why shouldn't people be concerned they
realize this threat?

Has anyone actually had anyone come anywhere close to raping or
murdering them in real life?

What's that? They haven't? So it's all random internet posturing
thrown out by morons on twitter?

Again, conservatives and libertarians are the victims of rape
and death threats just as often as leftists. Yet you don't hear as
much whining from them because they realize that's just what
happens on the internet so they don't throw hissy fits.

Is English your first language?
Realizing this threat means in this case actually rape and murder
somebody.

The question and following comment are what I would consider the
pot asking the kettle if it's black, since the comment is as good
as example of the butchery of the English language that I've heard
in a quite some time.

"Random assholes on the Internet" are real people you
know, and if they threaten to rape someone with the corpse of their
husband, as happened with Brianna Wu, why shouldn't people be
concerned they realize this threat?

The point is that these threats are just internet blustering and
are not serious threats. If you reread my post, you will see the
point I am making rather than the point your delusional,
semi-literate self imagines I was making.

See how collectivist generalizations work, Mr. "Atheist, Libertarian,
male feminist, gay, loner, nerd"? Yet, if someone applied your
"logic" to the latter, you'd squeal like a stuck pig. So are you
prepared to bite the bullet and concede that your gross
mischaracterization of GamerGate supporters was full of shit?

Related: are you kidding me you little piece of
shit i’ll have you know i graduated top of my politics class and
i’ve been involved in privilege checking with over 150 confirmed
political demonstrations i’m trained in conflict resolution and i
was the most oppressed person in my entire upper middle class high
school you are nothing to me but another cultural appropriator i
will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which have
never been seen on this side of the 49th parallel mark my words you
think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the
internet think again fucker, as we speak i’m checking with my
anarcho-communist analyst brigade for your location so you better
be prepared to deal with some molotov cocktails and angry feminists
flying through your window yOU’RE FUCKING DEAD CHERRY! i can be
anywhere at any time and i can kill you in over seven hundred ways
and that’s just with me boring you to death while i talk about
privilege not only am i extensively trained in hotline management
but i have access to an entire arsenal of sociological articles to
prove my point and i will use them to wipe your fucking face off
the earth you little shit if only you had known what oppressed
retribution your cultural appropriation would unleash then maybe
you would have held your fucking tongue but you couldn’t you’re
fucking dead kiddo

Keep zig-zagging away from my point, motherfucker. Now are you
going to admit your collectivist generalization and concede that
you were being mendacious or are you, having been called out on
your bullshit, just going to stick your fingers in your ears and
shout "la, la, la"?

If you want to criticize corruption in journalism, fine. But if
you use the GamerGate label, you are associated with wannabe
rapists, even if you are not one. It's as if you joined the Nazi
Party because of animal rights.

Because intellectually dishonest progressive scum wanted to
close ranks and defend their allies in the press, people like you
decided to scour Twitter and find as many dubious outlandish
threats as you could, so you could shut down discussion of these
issues by claiming that ALL PERSONS criticizing the gaming press
were misogynist rapist murderers.

It's what you do in literally every other context, so I'm not
surprised you attempted to do it here, too. But you can go fuck
yourself, because when people try to shout me down I just shout
louder.

Because intellectually dishonest progressive scum
wanted to close ranks and defend their allies in the press, people
like you decided to scour Twitter and find as many dubious
outlandish threats as you could, so you could shut down discussion
of these issues by claiming that ALL PERSONS criticizing the gaming
press were misogynist rapist murderers.

Having a pupil who happened to be Alexander the Great's tutor
surely helped with his notoriety.

Also if you read the first discourse in The Republic where
Socrates argues against the Sophist Thrasymachus about whether
justice is a virtue, Socrates deploys all sorts of rhetorical
tricks, and "wins" only because Thrasymachus failed to object to
one of them that proved to be crucial. (or at least Plato does not
document Thrasymachus objecting)

*facepalm* "Socrates favoured truth as the highest value,
proposing that it could be discovered through reason and logic in
discussion: ergo, dialectic. Socrates valued rationality (appealing
to logic, not emotion) as the proper means for persuasion, the
discovery of truth, and the determinant for one's actions. To
Socrates, truth, not aretē, was the greater good, and each person
should, above all else, seek truth to guide one's life. Therefore,
Socrates opposed the Sophists and their teaching of rhetoric as art
and as emotional oratory requiring neither logic nor proof."

YOU are the Sophist here.

By the by, how do you feel about Jim Sterling twittering that he
wanted to rip a woman's Fallopian tubes out with his bare fist "up
the cunt"? Bear in mind, before you answer, that he just came out
on the side of Leigh Alexander and against GamerGate... he's one of
YOURS. twitter.com/JimSterling/status/21946473587412992

Well this has been 'fun'. To sum up:
Irish is Dunning-Krugering and is forced to call people
stupid,
Fluffy's feelings are easily hurt,
Redmanfms is a bot that says "Keep spinning!",
Cytotoxic is a cheerleader.
I am sure everyone in this 'conversation' (me included) thinks they
have 'won', but if we're honest, we have all lost.

SWJ's threaten lawsuits, try to get the name "gamer" associated
with the most vile stereotypes in the world... get upset when
called on it, fake their "rape threats" and hope the gamers will go
away.

They won't. They've just started learning this, and are trying
DESPERATELY to shove this under the rug. It's too late. The gig is
up. The fake SWJ's and their cronies are up against a very vocal
group of people who don't take kindly to trying to undermine their
hobby.

At first, I thought you were Obvious Troll spouting something
knowing it was false but trying to get a rise out of folks.

Reading further on, it's more apparent that you have actually
drunk most if not all of the entire pitcher of Kool-Aid.

"SJWs" are not a group that "critiques games". In point of fact,
specific to this controversy, there's only two people one could
point to and honestly describe as both "SWJ" and "games critic"...
and both of them engaged in the sort of hyperbole and manufactured
outrage that real-world critics usually get shunned and lose
sponsors over.

Nor does anything point to GamerGate endorsing or levying
threats of rape and murder... but then again, as a leaderless group
with no organization and therefore no WAY to endorse or levy such
threats on the group's behalf, that would be impossible. As such,
people like yourself constantly assert that the entire group is
responsible for the reprehensible behavior of "someone on the
Internet" who happens to ALSO dislike GamerGate's opponents.

Meanwhile, however, people in GamerGate ARE being doxxed, ARE
being threatened in exactly the way you argue against, and ARE
being cut out of the gaming industry for speaking out against the
insanity of you and people like you.

"Objectively evil"? I don't think you understand what either of
those words mean.

The issue here to me is that a really shitty "social justice
artist" and her equally shitty press advocates got caught in a
fairly outrageous scandal, but that's not enough to flunk them out
of their profession because all they have to do is squeal
"SEXISTS!" and the entire progressive media world intervenes on
their side.

It's precisely because gaming is a relatively trivial area of
life that I'm as outraged by this as I am. If SJW trash can't flunk
out of life no matter what they do even in a marginal area like
gaming, and even in the face of fairly massive backlash and
opposition, then it's clear that the media and entertainment
industries are now corrupted from top to bottom and there's damn
little hope of progress in any other area.

I am under the impression that GG is expanding its focus to
include the good reviews that the mainstream sites hand out like
candy to shitty/tepid games that are produced by big game companies
or have a big following ("It's shit" 9/10-IGN). Maybe I'm just
projecting my hopes but it would be nice. It's so bad that I was
shocked when Dishonoured got panned and then when Destiny got the
ratings it did (I knew there was no way it could live up to the
hype let alone basic expectations, but I thought that wouldn't
matter).

That's always going to happen when you have reviews supported by
advertising. The objectivity-preserving alternative is to have them
supported by paid subscriptions, but in the Internet era that
requires strict IP controls which Reasonoids also hate.

The problem goes well beyond advertising. Reviewers get the
royal treatment from the companies whose games they review-special
transport to a special review room where they get to play the game
on sublime equipment while being pampered. Literally getting food
served to them. By the company whose product they are supposed to
be reviewing. There are YouTube game reviewers who can pan a game
and I am pretty sure they get at least a little revenue from
YouTube ads for games.

That's actually been part of the concern from Day One. Check out
"Gone Home" --- a decently-written GMod conversion involving the
exploration of an abandoned house to find where your family
went.

Decently-written, poorly designed. I have watched someone
playing drunk, and they finished the game in 20 minutes by
stumbling up to the attic. The big shocking surprise twist ending?
Your sister had an affair and ran off to be a lesbian.

Polygon gave it 10/10 Game of the Year... NOT KIDDING. And
they're totally straight-faced about it, calling it
socially-conscious trend-setting. Sorry, but Bioware's put out more
complex and involved LGBT stories in its games over the last few
years, and none of these wankers gave a cuss because it wasn't from
an indie developer who knew people that they knew personally.

You seem to have made the mistake of naively taking GamerGate at
face value. This is apparently a movement inspired by 4chan, so
expect their motivces to be deliberately obscured.

Having been identified as a Social Justice Warrior, let me
assure you, I have a shitload of porn on my hard drive, and if
someone was attacking the Gamer's right to play whatever damn
male-oriented games they like, I'd be with them. Instead we've had
repeated attacks a woman's right to do things like making youtube
videos commenting without being subject to harassment and character
assasination.

In my opinion, GamerGate intends nothing less than an
ideological purge against feminism in Gamer Media. In other words,
censorship. This doesn't necessarily apply to everyone taking part.
Like I said, the motives are obscured, but check out this video
where GG demands are listed. Notice that "corruption" is brushed
over pretty quickly, and much of the video is a long list of
editorial concerns, essentially a list of "approved topics" for
gaming publications to cover.

In my opinion your inability to think critically and respond to
actual arguments put forward by non-SJWs is typical of SJWs. You
didn't read or comprehend the article, so we get a bunch of red
herrings like '4chan; obscured) and LIES about how GG wants to
purge feminists (although that might be necessary to not have the
kind of incestuous corruption we clearly see here given the
amorality and drive of SJWs). To top it off, you include a video
from some a-hole who can only CLAIM to speak for GG.

So the gamer gate agenda is represented by a video with 974
views on YouTube?

If GG is about censoring women from making YouTube comments and
not about you... You know what everyone knows it's about than prove
it. Show us how all the GG sites and articles articulating this
point.

Shit, right above you is nearly 500 comments supporting GG. Find
one (without making it yourself) calling for censorship.

You seem to have made the mistake of naively taking a random
Youtube video with low views as being representative of the
leadership of a much, much larger group. Over 90% of whom can't
possibly have watched it.

In my opinion, this is your video, and you're trying to boost
its signal by trolling Gamergate-related threads.

So in essence, "GamerGate" is about the shocking discovery that
internet anonymity breeds low-brow comments among a section of
juvenile men that like to say things online that they couldn't say
in real life.

And feminists think this is primae facie proof that all gamers
have problems with women.

Oddly enough, I just learned about this today when I was looking
at a game on kickstarter. I was looking at the game Kingdomcome
Deliverance and reading some comments there. Apparently the
developer (game looks awesome by the way and has taken in more than
2 million in crowd funding so far) is an evul gamergate type and so
he's being attacked by feminists and mindless lefties.

These shreeking harpies have about as much chance of stopping
games being developed that males like to play, as they do of
stopping the sun from coming up tomorrow morning. IOW, zero. Guys
for the most part are just not interested in playing my little pony
or farmville. You want to play farmville? Have at it. You want to
stop me from playing the games that I like? Pizz the fuck off, it's
not going to happen.

I just found out about this shit, today. Oddly enough, it was
only because I was looking at a game on kickstarter that I was
thinking of backing. And now because I see the developer has been a
target of these twisted fucksticks, I WILL back it.

I don't think this is a good day for the anti-game screechers.
Sociopaths like that love to live under a rock while working behind
the scenes to coerce an easily cowed by special interest government
into doing their evil bidding. They fear exposure.

There are millions of avid gamers around the world who love to
play the kind of games that these sick control freaks want to ban.
We need to expose this evil and get the gaming community as angry
as possible about it.

I'd say that the weekends definitely see their fair share of
trolls, but this topic has brought a greater level of activity from
regulars than is usual for a Sunday. I haven't seen a 500+ comment
thread on a weekend in quite a while.

Scroll down to the part where the Anti-GG people state that
games shouldn't be about fun but about social justice.

These poisonous people don't give a shit about games, they care
about their social justice agenda.

All we gamers ever wanted to do was talk about video games
(shocking I know). It is the Anti-GG people who wanted to talk
about their genitalia and who they like rubbing their genitalia
against.

Ultimately this poisonous agenda will lead to a beige sludge of
games that are utterly homogenized and dull. These people do not
understand you will not attract Call of Duty players and FarmVille
players with the same game. The only way to achieve that goal is to
make all games dull via quotas.

This agenda and the people who support it are a scourge on
gaming (I'd go as far to say diversity, sense, logic, and reason as
well). GG is ultimately a consumer movement attempting to save
their hobby from the homogenizing that social justice wants to
force on it. I for one am not willing to budge one inch (or 2.54cm
for my non-standard reader) to allow this toxic agenda in.

These poisonous people don't give a shit about games, they
care about their social justice agenda.

The biggest problem with SJW's isn't just that they're joyless
moronic harpies, it's that they insist on taking the joy out of
everything else just to massage their fragile sensibilities. These
people can't even play a fucking video game, something that's
supposed to be just mindless entertainment, without getting
butthurt about something.

And that would be bad enough, but they have to go one step
further and try to get rid of the kinds of games that make them
butthurt, because HOW DARE ANYONE ELSE NOT GET JUST AS BUTTHURT AS
THEM!!!111!! IOW, they can't just STFU and enjoy something meant to
be harmless entertainment, so they have to make damn sure that no
one else can either.

It's the insistence on politicizing everything and using
literally anything as an excuse to push their Social Justice
horseshit that makes them obnoxious.

Scroll down to the part where the Anti-GG people state that
games shouldn't be about fun but about social justice.

I got this growing up in prog-tard Canada.
The progs are all mad that movies are used for entertainment
instead of education.
Because don't you know that all media human beings consume must be
directed towards turning them into being better, more enlightened,
more progressive human beings?

Providing the people with mere entertainment is, like,
vulgar, and gross and stuff.

As a 30 year old woman who's been playing video games since I
was 4 and consider myself a serious lover of video games....I
personally love playing video games aimed mostly at men. Games
marketed towards women would probably be super boring and lame.
I'll keep my Master Chief and Cortana just the way they are thanks.
Feminists can suck my dick (if I had one). Wait was that sexist or
something? Also I did not create this account just to comment on
this article.

Is there anything dumber then trying to troll, and flame a bunch
of gamers? We're talking about a group of people that after killing
you Halo will then proceed to teabag the ever loving shit out of
your corpse, and then record the event in theater mode so they can
share it with others, or enjoy it at a later time.

You know what's really funny. The gamers are reading your
comments to ARealGamer and wondering in their own forums who would
be stupid enough to come in here and try to half ass an argument
with libertarians.

Man it's nice to see this ideology torn to shreds in a place
that isn't tone policed to shit. Signed up here just to say
thanks.

But, while I'm here, I might as well go on a rant of my own.

These people are an embarrassment. They're an embarrassment to
gaming, they're an embarrassment to journalism, but, most of all,
they're an embarrassment to good conspiracies everywhere.

For crying out loud, we're fighting a media war against the
media. The fact that we so much as stood a chance is already
ridiculous, but the fact that we're winning is downright insane.
Why the fuck did we ever listen to these people?

They're incompetent on a level that's personally offensive to
me. Every single thing they've done during this whole mess has been
the stupidest thing they could have done, and Jesus Christ their
manipulation tactics are downright amateur. Can't wait to see them
all gone.

We are glad to have you. You'll do just fine here as long as you
don't mention deep dish pizza. Also I would have gone with Spread
Cannon over Megafire, but that is a personal preference. Once
again, welcome and stick around.

Gaming journalists are caught between capitalist reality and
their own frustrated aspirations to be serious cultural
critics.

This. Basically, there are a bunch of people who went to
journalism school and learned a bunch of bullshit critical theory
and then got stuck writing video game reviews because (Surprise!)
there just aren't that many jobs for film critics or literary
critics out there. Writing for PCWorld was the best job they could
get in the dying print media.

The ultimate blame, really, lies with the student loan program.
Some retard gave them $40,000 to get a journalism degree and didn't
tell them that they would be lucky if they got to be a hack writer
who occasionally got to nail a mediocre chick game developer in
exchange for a positive review.

That's the sad thing. Outside of Totilo none of them studied
Journalism. "Games Journalists" are what you get to be at the far
end of the worthless humanities and assorted outrage studies
programs. At best they have the occasional neurotic English major
(Jenn Frank) but my personal favorite has to be The Megaphone
herself. The woman who spits fire and crushes dreams. Leigh
Alexander. (Now remember this person was recently published in Time
Magazine.) her "journalistic credentials"? A 2 year Drama degree
from a local arts school. Yep! The wicked witch of the west coast
that declared her employers audience dead is by training and
profession an actual drama queen.

YouTube has exploded with #GamerGate, same with Twitter, and
Tumblr. It has even spawned a brand new chan (8chan) Now Reason has
weighed in and the Internet brawl will now spread here.

About the creation 8chan.co, it's sad to see 4chan become a
causality of GamerGate. Something happened. Looking at all the
twitter images from him and his recent social life, maybe moot
decided to get a girlfriend. Unfortunately all the girls he's
meeting seem to be SJWs. Whatever the case, not only was the GG
thread in 4chan was permanently closed (due to doxxing) but any
mention of it resulted in a ban.

487 posts. New concern trolls in the thread...Reason regulars
are tearing them apart.

Seriously, this is an ideological massacre. Nikki, Fluffy,
Papaya, fucking CYTO, with Mulatto adding in that extra-tasty
bite."

"It is pretty hilarious to watch it get torn apart. Seriously,
who thinks picking a fight with the libertarians on their home turf
is going to end well. These guys have nothing but practice arguing
against people that disagree with them."

"bloody hell.
the gloves really come off without the 140character limit .
welcome to the heavy weight class, I guess."

"My roommate has been reading the comments out loud for the past
15 minutes now and everyone in the house cannot stop laughing.
We've even stopped playing Dota just to continue reading this.

I must say, the regulars of that forum have an excellent command
of the english language that I am envious of. I feel sorry for
anyone stubborn enough to continue arguing with this bunch without
rational points to back them up."

My apologies, Hazel, I had only skimmed at that point. I figured
Reason would cover it eventually. Didn't expect it to pop up on a
Sunday.

The sheer quality of the posts here, combined with a distinct
lack of censorship regarding strong or charged language, has always
generated really impressive discussion. I may not post much, but
I'm always reading the comments.

I really, really want this fight. Please, bring it on, you
foolish luddites. I'm a software engineer for more than 15 years
and I'm just now looking to enter the gaming industry. Please,
bring it on, it can only mean more money for game developers, and
complete disgrace for you anti-gamer luddites.

I think the SJW morons may be starting to realize they kicked a
much bigger hornet's nest than they thought. Of course, they're
epically stupid so these kind of miscalculations are par for the
course for them. Their only tactic is browbeating, but when the
people you're trying to browbeat are having none of it and tons of
people agree with them, browbeating backfires. Oops! But again, the
SJWs are mongoloids so expecting them to realize this is folly.

I have a feeling that certain outlets are scared off by the
"-ist" accusations being hurled by the SJWs and Reason has finally
emerged from cover while HuffPo is still in hiding, trying to keep
itself convinced that there's nothing to really write about. When
freaking Slate is a more prompt advocate for transparency and
condemning thuggishness and fraud you need to take a hard look in
the mirror.

There was one story there about something tangential. It was
noteworthy in that it was fairly neutral if not slightly pro
consumer / GG. I can't remember what it was specifically about now.
It was like 6 weeks ago.

Hey, Suthenboy, as someone who thinks of myself as a friend of
your's here, I will try to explain.

Basically, what this is about is free speech. You just have to
read the story and back through the posts to see. To some of us,
this really strikes home, but it's an important issue for all
libertarians.

Thank you. I went back over it a bit. It just has that Jr. HS
flavor. I guess that is what turns me off. I have no interest in
games and I am not part of that culture. Plus I don't see anyone
trying to use the force of law to censor, though I am sure that
will come.

Geeky boys playing games that portray women the way geeky boys
like. Complaining about that is like complaining about the
weather.

Agreed. I wasn't complaining that the article was here, only
that I am out of touch with the whole gaming culture making it
difficult for me to understand what is going on. Its just my
getoffmylawnism.

That is a shame too. If I had come along later than I did I
would have been a complete game freak. I grew up watching Star Trek
on a 13in black and white TV. In my late teens I got to play games
in arcades, games like Astroids, Pac Man etc. The most
sophisticated game I ever played was Stargate....if anyone
remembers that. I imagined games like the ones played today, but I
didn't see them coming along before I lost interest in that sort of
thing.

Then I got caught up in the real shit and by the time that was
over I had lost all taste for pretend violence. If not for that I
probably would have gotten back into games when they got really
good.

To me the thing that made it a libertarian issue is that they
had Quinn and her defenders in the gaming press dead to rights.

DEAD. TO. RIGHTS.

They were nailed like Jayson Blair and Mike Barnicle were
nailed.

But they figured out a way to fight their way out.

They yelled WAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH SEXISTS! and the entire
progressive and feminist community leaped to their defense.

That made it a libertarian issue to me - because if their gambit
was allowed to succeed, any criticism of any minor left-wing figure
forevermore would be treated the same way.

These fuckers thought they could just run a quick Eric Holder
and walk away clean. And that enrages me quite a bit. Their problem
is that they tried to play that game without the POTUS and
thousands of nuclear warheads to back them up.

Then of course there's also the fact that when people went to
the usual internet haunts where questions like this would be
discussed, there were mass thread deletions, bannings, etc. spurred
on by SJW rage.

And yadda yadda yadda SLD about site owners getting to run their
sites the way they see fit - but there any many sites that piss me
off by claiming to be about internet freedom that routinely lock
and ban shit as soon as any poor little feminist stubs her toe.
(I'm looking at you, reddit.)

I hadn't realized that even 4chan had bowed to this nonsense.
Fuck. Even the chan? That's like telling me that Snowden bugged my
phone.

On August 28, Gamasutra ran a blistering attack on "game culture"
by feminist cultural critic Leigh Alexander, declaring that "gamers
are over" and ridiculing them as socially inept, badly dressed
young males addicted to mindless gadget-buying and "getting mad on
the Internet."

And the NY Times covering the Intel pullout still don't get it,
nor do any mainstream gaming sites. How dumb do you have to be when
even Salon gets it as Nikki pointed out above, about biting the
hand that feeds you?

I'm so glad this is coming to a head because mainstream media,
so many western gaming sites, with the exception of a few niche
outlets, have long been infected with uber-PC SJW
white-knight'ism.

It should be noted that #GamerGate is bigger than 4chan, it's
bigger than Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook.

Before GG users of those sites would routinely raid each other,
fling shit at each other, even outright denigrate each other.
#GamerGate is the banner that brought all these different people
from these sites and others not named together to put our petty
differences aside for the greater purpose. We've made peace with
Atheists (Who had their own problems with Atheism+), those sites I
listed, right-wing and libertarian, publications and websites. We
have a rather impressive conglomerate of allies.

For all the political positioning leftists have claimed for
Millennials, this might just be enough for my generation to see the
shit-forest for the shit. Progressivism is a tumor that absolutely
must be burnt out of gaming before it grows.